Getting an IBM XT 5160 with 10MB HDD

I am really excited today because I just brought home an IBM 5160 and this does have a 10 megabyte IBM hard drive I'm pretty excited to fire this thing up and see what's on there see if it'll even work at all or what it might take to resuscitate it but for now I want to actually go through this a little bit because it took a lot of work to get an IBM 5150 working for me the first time and I'm pretty sure it's not gonna be any easier to get this thing going this is definitely a proper 51 60 not just a 5150 with a hard drive crammed in it and there's no more obvious indication of that than how many ISA slots there are oh it's really nice to have the three extra 1c 5150 can be a bit cramped when you really start loading it up now this is interesting and one of the reasons why I considered purchasing this computer we can see we have what seems like mostly stock cards here but then we have this serial port and I've already opened this up it came with a ram expansion that's fully populated it's really nice to get one of those with a computer for once because I keep having to buy them to populate the computer so huh that's nice I just plunked down the money for an ASD six pack plus for one of these for my compact portable and yeah they aren't cheap now the seller said this thing was ready to go out of the box but I haven't tried firing it up yet and don't really want to my previous experience with IBM 5150 s makes me concerned this could have shorted tandems or something like that inside and I have already looked in here and have identified one problem so we're definitely gonna take this slow and not fire this up until we're sure this thing is gonna work this does have the incorrect screws on the back so someone has been in here doing something when well we we knew that from the beginning because of the expansion card in there so yeah that's obvious but all of these screws are wrong in this one is a Philips so yeah someone's been changing some stuff around if you're not very familiar with the differences between the 5150 and the 5160 let's take a look at the big ones inside the main differences between an IBM PC which is a 5150 and the XT which is a 5160 or the extra is a slots more powerful power supply and the 5160 usually came with a harddrive now again I haven't fired this up yet but I do believe this is going to be a 10 megabyte hard drive and this thing is just massive I mean that's a full-height hard drive that's not half height that's not three and a half inch this thing is huge I want to get this out here so we can take a look at it this hard drive is a Seagate St 412 and is definitely the one that should be in the 5160 and we know that just from the fact that it says IBM on the hard drive plate instead of Seagate this thing weighs just shy of 5 pounds it is massive all for 10 megabytes full height hard drives like this work fairly quickly replaced with half height drives like this it's fairly common to see half height drives like this in an XT or 80 computer with a floppy disk drive on top as well this allowed to use both floppy disk ports on your floppy controller and to have a hard drive the half inch drives were just they make a lot more sense they're a lot more densely compacted than the whole height drive here which is massive and has a lot of empty space in it now another thing to know about really old drives like this is that they're not IDE this is actually an MFM drive which means you need an MFM controller this is not the controller that came with this computer this is another one entirely and it would only work in an 80 class computer but MFM drives need two cables to be connected just for data there's still the third standard molex connector for power alright let's get back to the computer itself and see what cards are included in the 5160 I have here this is the floppy controller card that comes in the 5160 and the 5150 now if you're curious here this connector might seem a little weird but this is actually an external floppy connector this controller can handle four drives in total two on this connector and two on this one there's an expansion chassis available for the IBM pcs that allows you to have two more floppy drives in an external box now there's nothing stopping you from putting hard drives in there either but this is the hard drive controller behind it and there's no external connection so it'd be a little bit more difficult but not impossible this is just a really interesting thing it's unfortunate that modern floppy controllers that support high-density drives unlike this one don't have that because of making it so much easier to have more than just two drives in a computer moving on here is the MFM controller for these drives now I'm not actually sure about this is the first time I've seen this one it looks like it is an IBM card and it's obviously full-length so that's pretty cool but yeah I'm guessing this here would be the IBM BIOS that would allow the computer to boot from this card because the original IBM 5150 specifications wouldn't allow you to boot from a device like a hard drive he needed a newer version of the BIOS to be able to do that that's why the hard drive controllers like the XD IDE have a BIOS onboard next we have the RAM expansion I was so happy to see but something I'm not happy to see is this varta battery this is my first time in countering a Varda battery and it has not disappointed I'm going to have to remove that today as it is leaking out of the negative side wonderful and the final card in the computer is a monochrome black and white and parallel card by IBM pretty standard this would be the minimum spec for the 5160 for sure but yeah you know it's not bad at least it has something I would have liked to have got a CGA card or maybe an EGA card but that would be a bit out there so this is a plenty good for now I actually have an extra one of these already so yeah but you know at least it'll hopefully do something now that's something I'm really excited to see in here a ceramic package 8087 oh that that thing is pretty it's plenty that it's a real intel 8087 paired with an AMD 8088 this is the math coprocessor for the IBM PC and XT I don't have one of these in any of my other computers so that's gonna be really fun to check out it really doesn't make any kind of performance difference but it would be still useful if you're doing real work on this computer it's only going to be used for specific applications like floating-point calculations so in games you're not gonna really see that big of a difference but it's cool to see it nonetheless this board came fully loaded with the maximum of 250 K of RAM on board oh that's nice not have to track these down and I'm pretty sure was actually ordered like this originally has these yellow dots which I'm guessing someone was trying to check for a bad Ram chip and all of the brand of the chips are the same and the date codes are all fairly similar I at least have the same Mac's which looked like it was about week 13 so yeah but they're all 1983 chips and yeah this is looking like it was ordered that way which is kind of cool you know it's oh man it's a whole lot of years later so it really doesn't matter what was changed on this but it's still cool to see stuff like that this board is absolutely filthy but I'm not going to be concerned about taking it apart and cleaning it like that today I'm mostly concerned about finding any possible faults before I powered up for the first time now for the all-important shorted tantalum capacitor test it's looking like I'm pretty good so I have my multimeter in the back here and I'm doing a ohms test so if I short against a power supply you'll see it's really really low and if I check all of the power rails that are not ground on the power connector we can see that move or something it's getting readings before there we go we can see that the power supply is actually doing just fine that's ground so that's what that should be and five volts is about 200 ohms which I remember it's seeming about that on my 5150 when I did that video so that all looks good it looks like I don't have any shortened tantalum 's in the motherboard so now it would just be on the expansion cards I don't have to worry about that so I'm gonna go through put each one of those back in double check for shorts and then after those paths I can remove the varda battery and we should be clear to launch hmm I put in the black and white card and now I'm putting in the MFM card and when I do that five volt rails go down to 38 ohms to ground that seems super low so there might actually be a shorted tantalum on the MF M controller it was a very good thing I checked this first well now the floppy controller does it to dragging it down to 35 ohms I'm going to review my 5150 footage and see if it did that with the floppy controller on there because I definitely should have recorded that and that kind of sounds familiar so maybe the 38 ohms on the MFM controller is actually normal 33 well I'm gonna have to disagree with me here that now I remember going on to finish this video and not finding any faults with the floppy controller so the one in here is probably fine which means that the MFM controller is probably fine as well okay all that's left to look at here is the RAM expansion card now I haven't looked this up yet but there is an FCC ID on here and somewhere down here I'll edit what brand this is if I can find it because it's not marked anywhere on the card so I don't actually know what this is but it doesn't really matter it's not an AST 6-pack and it's not a tech mark captain I have those those don't look like this and they don't use vardas either that's for sure now I already stuck this in the computer and tested the resistance of the power rails none of the many many tantalum capacitors on there appear to be shorted so that's good because that would be a lot of work so it looks like I'm in the clear on this card except for the Varga battery which I do believe it is time to remove so this is the dreaded varta battery and all of its corrosive glory and as I mentioned I have yet to experience one of these thankfully none of the many vintage computer things I've brought home have had one in it but it's time for that to change so these are infamous for failing like this and leaking corrosive acid on to the board so we're gonna have to take a look at what damage has been caused and I think I'm gonna get off easy here really doesn't look too bad get a closer look in there in a little bit but yeah it's leaking out of just the one side and I don't know a lot about these I don't know if they leak out of both sides or if it's usually just the negative side like it has on this one but thankfully it doesn't look like it's spread too far so this is actually for the RT C that's on this card calling this a ram expansion isn't quite fair these usually do Ram and serial and parallel and real time clock sometimes game ports so these do these cards usually do a lot and this is on here for the real-time clock I don't care if my IBM 5160 knows what actual time it is it does not matter at all to me for all I know it's not even a y2k compatible in handle times that are relevant now so frankly if I can get this to work without any battery in here I'll be just fine now all I did here was spray this with some compressed air and I got a bit of a look at what was going on underneath all that corrosion it looks like possibly just one trace may have been affected which is gonna be getting off pretty easy here so that seems kind of nice once we get the battery out we'll see if that one is still making its way off - where's that going going to this yeah it looks like it snakes around to that contact so we'll see if that pad up there is still in contact with this one down here once that battery's off I don't think it's too bad so I suspect it's going to work so all that we have to do now is just get the battery off and there may not even be any PCB repair needed here easy enough there were a couple more suspicious spots revealed under the battery I'm going to go ahead and flux and resolder or everything under there so I can get an idea of what is and is not still metal down there alright it looks like there may have only been a single casualty here so this trace is successfully going down to there and it makes contact over there as well this trace here miraculously is good so that one's fine but this one here connects over to all that one wasn't working just a moment ago there we go sorry I think I managed to get the barrel fully filled with solder but the annular ring there is gone so I'm going to have to bridge this over to here or probably be better to bridge this all the way over to here so it's taking some hits but overall it's fine I should actually look where that one goes on the other side that looks complicated to find maybe I'll do that but I don't think there's any problems there so yep I'll just put the one bodge wire over on there and then it should be good to go there we go I think that worked out pretty well I kept it low profile enough so that if I ever get a VAR to battery replacement it should be able to fit nicely underneath I did check this via on the other side and it's making connection to wherever it traced off to but yeah that one's fine going through the barrel so I should be ready to throw this in the 5160 and try firing it up alright we checked the tantalum capacitors on the motherboard and expansion cards they all looked pretty good we've removed the varda battery and I have everything reconnected I think we're ready to try firing this up for the first time I'm excited alright I have a NBA monitor up here so I'm just gonna fire it up and we'll see what happens let me get it plugged in under the desk and then I'll flip the switch alright it's live Wow a lot of light flicker beep beep beep beep I don't know what that means let's look at the monitor oh that's that's not good that's not good um it's not tantalum capacitors that are bad hope it's the MDA card because I can swap that out in seconds off on no way could it really just be a bad video card 301 I think it's keyboard this is an untested XT keyboard that I got recently so I wouldn't be a surprise it doesn't work I have no idea I think it might have just worked all right time to see if the boots oh it worked okay all right it's accessing the hard drive time to see if there's das on it or if it works I'm seeing the thing move it didn't is it the trend boot das ski oh it worked it it it it loaded the keyboard worked - so why is it give me a 301 error no way weird word and totally uncharted territory now exit menu exit - das yes exit - dass ER v dude it works the hard drive works - all that's awesome I need it like I need to back up the contents of the hard drive like right now alright so I checked the compact flash xt ide in there the one that doesn't have a built-in controller or anything that way I could just see if it would boot off of that the BIOS recognizes it it's seeing the card this is one that I've tested in my 5150 that works and it's not working in this I've read that there's some xt ide bios incompatibilities with the 5160 and this is an edge case xt ide for sure so this just might not be able to work I will later put the full on tige in here but that's in my compact portable right now and I really don't want to tear that thing apart again at the moment so later on I'll go ahead and throw the xt ide in here i think that's going to be the best way to image the data off of the hard drive but yeah we definitely want to get that copied off while the drives alive and working okay that's it it's working we've got the hard drive booting and it's just oh man this is this is seriously awesome I'm so excited that hard drives working I was not expecting it to work or that I was gonna have to tear it down and redo bruh Kate the stepper motor or something I don't know for the meantime I've stuck the inner knock the Enter key the plus key from the numpad of my other model F because it was holding down the key and causing the computer just not be happy that's what that keyboard error is at the boot so if I restart now it won't throw that error and now it's just gonna boot straight from the drive telling me Doss key is installed up here when it's ready there we go and now we're into the menu so yeah now it's nice and happy no errors on start oh this this makes me so happy being MDA what you can do with it a little limited I'll have to get another CGA card now or figure something out I don't know I'd love to go EGA but monitors are so expensive that that's that's gonna take a while um that yeah that's this is really nice let me let's take a look around here okay so my computer office is apparently gonna launch a program I was thinking our office we might actually do something the 8087 so I'm curious to see here f5 for calculator I don't know I don't know what this is gonna do I have no idea what's offers on here I'm gonna really tried yet so let's get one no num lock 1 + 5 6 ok but is it why is this 1 2 3 that wasn't three why is it in decimal 1.0 Aereo strange yeah though this is this seems like it's working really well f8 tape to disc what on earth does that mean and escape to exit I wonder if this is going to drop me to das or go back to the menu yeah I goes back to the menu one of the menu substitutes command calm let's see diskpart from moving computers or disk park Oh this program will move the heads on your Seagate to their dedicated landing zone this process is recommended prior to any physical relocation of the computer oh that's nice that is really good to know this program reported ok that's yeah that's ok I'll definitely I'll definitely keep that in mind I wonder if that was run the last time the computer is turned on I doubt it yeah alright now let's see here let me go grab something that I think will run on this with MDA and see what we can do actually I think that we'll just run an MDA mode but we've done enough that on here yeah the MDA limitation really kind of sucks for games here this is pole position I don't think it's disco actually works anyway at least I haven't worked for the last couple times for me and it's clearly writing to the MDA screen space and it's there's no MDA card so I'll have to try something else I can't remember I don't think that will work with yeah I don't know let's find out I can't remember that will do MDA at all I think it's just gonna be CGA I don't really want to move the CGA card for my 5150 into this so it's that's a complete system it just works yeah well it's booting back up for the record I did run a cleaning disk through the disk drive first because I like my disks I don't want them getting trashed this really has no reason to work I can try Hercules but Hercules isn't gonna do anything CJ's not gonna do anything the MD adapter just doesn't have graphics basically that's why it's the color graphics adapter and not the color display adapter the MDA monochrome display adapter card is just text really so yeah there's isn't gonna do anything I can go ahead and just quit this actually so none can I only type one of those choices three why not we're gonna write to the hercules screen space which is not in this card's vocabulary so it doesn't matter there's a chance that it could try and run but now a long yeah so there is not a whole lot I can do on here that is entertaining with an MBA card and like I said I don't want to move the CGA card over here so for now this computer is just going to be stuck until I can get another display card for it well I think that's pretty much everything there is to do with this computer we removed the horrid varta battery so it should have a long happy healthy life now I'll look into replacing that later maybe I don't know I don't really care the rame expansion cards clearly working fine but it's also clearly no longer keeping time I don't mind like I said it really isn't a problem to me I don't care about having a clock in this computer but I don't mind repairing stuff either so I might looking at at some point speaking of repairing the MDA card that came in this computer now I don't see anything in particular that's wrong with this it's most likely this ROM or the chip the main chip itself that's a pretty weird problem it was having there I wouldn't be surprised if this card went bad when this thing was still being used and that's why I got shelved it it's kind of unfortunate it was just an MDA card that took it how probably one of the lowest cost parts you can get for it but you know there are a few questionable solder joints on here so this might be very easily repairable without replacing one of the annoying chips on here so I might take a look into that at some point cuz now I used up my backup MDA card which I'm very happy I found I actually found that at Goodwill that was weird I saw that and like I've got to be one of the only few people who's gonna come in here for weeks or months it's gonna recognize this thing but anyway yep I'm super tickled with this and that the disk drives working I really really shocked that the 10 megabyte disk drive was working I was expecting that to happen now I'd really like to get the hard disk backed up on here the xt ide was my first go-to option for doing that and that may be complicated obviously that one didn't work and now I'm wondering if any XT ID is going to be incompatible on this computer so I don't know what troubles I'm gonna have with that I do have other MFM controllers and I'd be fine sticking one of those in it might say 486 computer so maybe that'll happen but yeah I'd like advice from anyone who's done archival work on an MFM Drive I would really like to back this one up while it's still functional so yeah please leave comments on this video with suggestions on how I could do that because I would love to get that done the drive is almost entirely full it's only got 57 kilobytes free so they are totally up against the wall of the space they've got on here I don't know where they would have their own personal files I don't know if they would have left them on disks and it came with a acrylic cover that goes in there hopefully I didn't run it like that cuz that hard drive is getting warm I can already feel it on the front of it so it clearly shouldn't be run put the cover in there and the cover is cool and I don't think I've seen one of these before so that's that's interesting but anyway yeah kind of rambling I think we're done now not a lot more to cover I could clean it up but I'll do that off camera cuz I yeah we're at the point where that'd be boring so yeah hope you guys enjoyed this look at this IBM XT and sort of getting it working again if you guys want to support the channel I am on patreon but for now that's it I'll see you next time you

Channel: Tech Tangents

Views: 51,414

Rating: 4.9289699 out of 5

Keywords: AkBKukU, main, Computer, Repair, 1980s, IBM, XT, 5160, 1983, Desktop

Id: XoXTsFhamHU

Length: 27min 16sec (1636 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 29 2019